Winners of the prestigious 2012 National Jewish Book Awards were released today, and we are pleased to announce that Marc Tracy, editor emeritus of The Scroll and former staff writer of Tablet, co-edited the winning anthology Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame with Frank Foer.

The collection includes fifty essays about both athletic and non-athletic Jewish superstars, some of which were written by members of the Tablet staff and its contributors including Liel Leibovitz, Etgar Keret, Joshua Cohen, Deborah Lipstadt, Howard Jacobson, and many others. We dropped Marc a line to get his reaction on this most joyous day, here’s what he had to say:

“I’m flattered and honored to receive the award. Frank and I could not have done it without other people– not in the faux-modest way that people say that, but, literally, 48 of the 50 essays were written by our talented contributors, and so we actually could not have done it without them. Moreover, I personally couldn’t have done it without the support of Tablet and its staff.”

And hey: Youkilis in New York, Trestman in Chicago (maybe), Stern to be succeeded by Silver. As Tony Kushner said: ‘the Great Work continues,'” he added.

Among other great books that were finalists this year was Jonathan Sarna’s When Grant Expelled the Jews, one of our own Nextbook beauties about General Ulysses S. Grant’s decision to expel the Jews from the territory under his command during the Civil War.

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